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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[AUGUST, 1913.
Another fact has also come to light which confirms Mr. Vasu's theory. Babu Jaya Sankar, Vakil, Mandasor, has some property close to the city. While he was cultivating one of the fields, his men turned up a stone which contained an inscription. It was immediately taken. possession of and kept in the house of the Subbah of the Province. In October last I saw the stone and read it. But as my stay there was short, I was not quite satisfied with my reading. Babu Jaya Sankar very kindly gave me two impressions which he had taken on very thin paper. But as I wanted to be quite sure, I applied to Dr. Marshall, Director-General of Archaeology in India, and at his in stance Mr. D. R. Bhandarkar has sent me an excellent impression. This stone contains only half the inscription. It breaks up in the middle of a sentence. But the portion that remains gives us a good deal of historical information. It was incised in the year 461 of the Malava era, that is, 404 A. D., and it gives us a line of kings in Western India, uiz. Jayavarman, his son Simhavarman, and his son Naravarman, who was reigning in 404 A. D. Now, this Naravarman is known to us from the Gangdhår inscription, dated 426 A. D., of Visvavarman, who was his son. Referring to the new impression of the Susuniâ inscription given to me by Mr. R. D. Banerji, I find that what Mr. Vasu read Siddhavarman is really Simhavarman, written exactly in the same way as the Simhavarman in the inscription discovered by Mr. Jaya Sankar. In the Susunia inscription then, Simhavarman is the father of Chandravarman, and in the Mandasor inscription of 404 A. D. he is the father of Naravarman. May not Chandravarman and Naravarman be brothers? They both hail from western India, they both have the surname Varman, and the name of their father is also the same. They also come near to each other in time,- Naravarman in 404 A. D. and Chandravarman in Samudragupta's time, which Mr. Smith puts down from 345-880. But as his successor's earliest inscription is dated in Gupta Samvat 82, that is, 401 A. D., his reign may have come down to a few years later than 380 A. D. Mr. Smith is wrong, I believe, in including Mandasor in the map of Samudragupta's conqueste. For Naravarman and his son Viśvavarman do not seem to have acknowledged any obligation to the Guptas. The only inscription from Western Malwa in which a Gupta name appears is that of Bandhuvarman (436 A. D.), son of Viśvavarman, in which Kumaragupta's Lame is given first and then that of Bandhuvarman, who is again extolled for his many good qualities, showing that the subjection was not very hard. The line of Varman kings of Pushkarana would then run thus
Chandravarman
Jayavarman J Simhavarman I
Naravarman
I
Viśvavarman
Bandhuvarman, reigning in subjection to Kumaragupts.
It may be urged that the title of all these monarchs, namely mahdrája shows a subordinate position. But is it a fact that maharaja always meant a subordinate position? To whom would Maharaja Jayavarman be a subordinate? Naravarman's grandfather must have lived in 350 A. D. or thereabout. There was no big empire at that time in India, and, by the showing of Mr. Vincent Smith's map, Pokarna was never included in Samudragupta's conquests, and yet Simbavarman of Pokarna is styled a maharaja.
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